8 MARCH 16, 2020 |^ ADWEEK®
FANATIC^
STUDIO
/GARY^ WATERSMore than a glorified home speaker,
the simple plastic cylinder that is
Amazon’s Echo device has been
billed as a portal into a new way of
interacting with technology. It can
serve up everything from muse-like
creative inspiration to recipes with a
few spoken words of command.
But despite a saturation of such
devices in American households—
fueled by heavy discounts and
giveaways—and a proliferation of
tens of thousands Amazon Skill voice
apps—also fueled by heavy discounts
and giveaways for developers—around
half of Amazon Echo users simply don’t
bother to seek out new apps, according
to the most recent consumer adoption
report last year from voice-focused
research firm Voicebot.ai.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason
why the rate of new Amazon Skills
hitting the store dropped to its
lowest level since 2016 in January
after declining for months, per
Voicebot.ai’s research.
The format has yet to produce a big
breakout hit analogous to viral early
iPhone games that drew people into
the App Store. “We haven’t really seen
an Angry Birds,” said Bret Kinsella,
Voicebot.ai’s CEO and research
director. “There’s no Tap Tap Revenge.”
While Amazon has had plenty
of success disseminating its smart
speakers, maintaining a 70% share of
the U.S. market as of last month and
trailed by chief rival Google and some
niche competitors, the true value of
the hardware was always supposed
to lie in the behavioral data that could
be collected through a range of usage
rather than slash-rate device sales.
The app marketplace took it from a
simple gadget to a full-fledged digital
ecosystem that prompts brands to draft
entire voice-focused media plans and
agencies to build dedicated divisions.
Yet there are few, if any,
examples of marketers that have
created successful, sustained
branded experiences on theplatform, said Forrester research
analyst Jennifer Wise.
“I’ll be honest, there are not
stellar examples of companies that
have done this. There have been some
who promoted them through an ad,
like we saw with [a 2016 Super Bowl
stunt in which Domino’s pushed an
Alexa-based ordering tool] and those
get a flash-in-the-pan-like adoption,”
Wise said. “But for companies that are
seeking long-term repeatable usage,
very few have seen that.”
Lori Pantel, CMO at Fandango, said
the ticketing company was able to get
some traction for a relatively small
investment by being an early adopter
on voice platforms, but the technology
still has a ways to go before it
becomes a substantial driver of value.
Kinsella said there have been
a handful of third-party branded
experiences that have found
modest buzz this way, entering the
space when competitors were few
enough that they enjoyed outsize
earned media and Amazon-backed
promotion. But such success stories
are becoming fewer and farther
between, he said.
“So then the question is if other
third parties or voice apps aren’t
doing well, what’s the reason for
that?” Kinsella said. “Is it not that
useful? Is it that there’s no discovery?
Is it that people just haven’t changed
their behavior yet? And the answer is,
yes. All the above.”
Amazon has also been scaling back
the contests and monetary rewards it
had offered developers to incentivize
new Alexa Skills as the number
available has exceeded 70,000 in the
U.S. and 100,000 worldwide.
Kinsella remains optimistic about
the future of voice apps regardless,
arguing that Apple’s third-party App
Store experienced similar growing
pains when the iPhone first rolled out.
Selling consumers on changing their
daily habits can take time, and the
adoption of smart speakers as a whole
has happened much more quickly than
initial forecasts expected, he said.
But it may take some fundamental
changes in how developers approach
such projects to overcome the hurdle,
according to Wise.
“Overall, from a user perspective,
these experiences are just too
complicated, and the technology
isn’t intelligent enough to make
this something worthwhile for the
customers,” she said. “So the most
important thing these companies need
to do is begin to deliver some sort of
a true value to users and make the
interaction incredibly easy for these
interactions to become a preference
and to see broad adoption today.”THE UNCERTAIN
FUTURE OF VOICE
TECH
NEW APPS ARE STRUGGLING TO GAIN
TRACTION WITH USERS. BY PATRICK KULP
TRENDING
NUMBER OF NEW ALEXA
SKILLS ADDED BY YEARNUMBER OF ALEXA
SKILLS IN THE U.S.:70,000+
NUMBER IN THE WORLD:100,000+
DATA FROM
VOICEBOT.AIPATRICK KULP IS AN EMERGING
TECH REPORTER AT ADWEEK. HE
COVERS CREATIVE INNOVATION,
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE
FUTURE OF 5G. @PATRICKKULP201718,201831,201913,